She couldn't remember why she had gotten into the truck. There were many reasons to, she just couldn't remember which one in particular it was that led her to do it.
She knew immediately that he was dead. At the Academy, she had excelled at anatomy and physiology, recognizing early on their potential uses in the field. Still, it didn't require her expertise to see that the average human body simply didn't bend that way, not if the spine and lower rib cage were properly intact. It had been an obvious assessment, yet she had hesitated a moment before walking up to the cabin of the truck. She had remembered him leaving the keys there.
She hopped in and started the engine. Thaniel's limp body slid down over the gravel road as she took off. She did not bother to look back as she accelerated down the dusty mountain path.
It was strange to her, how long she had spent thinking about it. She had driven for a long time, until the truck was running low on gas and despite Avanti's best directions, she had still felt lost in the great wilderness around her. Mechanically, she had told Avanti about the vault she had found, down in the concrete catacomb beneath Warrentown.
The door had been well-hidden, and under different circumstances she might never have noticed it at all. Concealed by long passageways and blind corners, she had found it a black, smooth thing; an obsidian iron slab merged into the wall itself. She had run her hand along it and wondered at how one could have discovered it if not for that slightest crack in its seam, where the almost imperceptibly cooler air was leaking in. It was that wisp of air -- stale by any other standard, but still immeasurably fresher than the unclean atmosphere that she had then been in -- that had led her to it. With her omni-device, she had focused her light beam into an intense laser and split the door along the seam, and then, with considerable effort, had pulled it open just enough to be able to squeeze through.
That had been her last transmission, though she had wished Avanti were there with her as she looked at the other side of the door, dented and bent by something that must have possessed immense strength and durability. As the signal linking her and her Operator faded, the internal timer of the omni-device began to count down. The echo of its periodic beeping stretched and ran along the cavernous stone walls. As she carefully ventured forward, her flashlight shining into the unending darkness, she began to notice specks of white in the ground that she tread upon. Kneeling down, she had found that they were bone fragments, and as she went deeper, she saw larger pieces -- discarded, it seemed, against the sides of the expansive tunnel. She took care to not get lost down any of the myriad side openings and split paths, but where she could, she would shine a light. Behind one corner, she had shone her flashlight straight across and found a blank wall. As she turned back, the cone of light brushed by the edge of the pit where suddenly it reflected off the bone white skulls that had been dumped there. Down in the pit, staring up at her were hundreds of pairs of hollow, black, abyssal eyes -- their empty sockets absorbing nothing, figurehead gatekeepers to the concave bone behind them.
She had found other pits, filled with the skeletons of what appeared to be local fauna. The bones seemed canine, primarily, but she also noticed a few bear skulls, as well as the distinctive antlers of cervids that did not naturally habitate the region. With the omni-device's timer beeping again to signal that another five minutes had passed, she had happened upon a cave that had no end. In its extensive vastness was a gurney, upon which lay an enormous wolf, seven or eight feet long--its chest and limbs split open along their length; its skin flayed and its bones bared. Its head was missing and she had noticed that its vital innards had been curiously removed. As she scanned the edges of the cavern, she found other animal parts, preserved as limbs and indistinguishable organs in formaldehyde jars, lined up along the wall.
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Realizing that her time was drawing down and that she would not find the end to this labyrinth anytime soon, she had turned to go when she heard a loud clang at the entrance to the vault. Almost simultaneously, she had felt an intense pain in her forehead, and her head pulsed as if her brain were contracting and yet ready to explode at the same time. An intense wave of nausea followed, and she had fallen to her knees. The ground was spinning underneath her, rotating clockwise beneath her left hand but then counterclockwise beneath her right. Her wrists felt limp and soft and as the blood rushed away from her face her eyes rolled into the back of her head and everything, for a moment, went black.
When she had woken, her omni-device had been beeping again. As if suddenly rebooted, she wiped the vomit from her mouth and immediately crawled to her knees. There was no time. Against all her body's urgings, she willed herself up and began to stagger towards the entrance. The tunnel pitched and swayed around her, but as she picked up speed, her dizziness began to subside as her body began to adjust to the equilibrium set by her forward momentum.
She did not have to see the vault door, bent back and partially torn off its massive, bolted hinges to know what she had already somehow guessed at -- that something had been there. Rushing through the fetid atmosphere, she burst upstairs just as a massive shadow disappeared out the front door of the building. Following and stumbling out into the clean, wintry air, she began to cough as Avanti reestablished contact.
She had told her all of this -- Katya to Avanti -- as she had driven deep into the woods far beyond any place the G.C.N. had ever before penetrated. She had had a direction in mind, but the roads were never direct, and she relied on Avanti to tell her how to stay on track. Southeast, she had said, I can't explain it, but that's where we need to be heading. It had been hours and the cloudiness that she felt ever since falling unconscious in the vault only seemed to be growing in intensity. And despite Avanti's warnings, for she could see the impairment as well in her headset and from her consoles -- a concussion, perhaps? -- Katya refused to stop.
Finally, it was Revner's voice that had come over the line. He had been watching the whole time. He had heard her explain what happened during the signal-breakage, and then he had watched as Avanti plotted her course southeast. He had ordered Avanti to search through the archives to see where her bearings were leading her, and he had listened as she described the mountainous region Katya was heading into -- that it was home to an abandoned cave system from which the Fringeland rebels, during the war, had once staged guerrilla attacks against the Confederacy occupation. Finally, Revner had heard enough. Bring her in, he ordered, and when Katya refused Avanti's continued demands to change course, he himself put on the headset and gave the direct order forcing her to abort and to redirect to a safe zone where he had already arranged for her to be picked up and temporarily relieved from duty.
Throughout all of this, throughout the stealth copter pick-up back into Confederacy territory, throughout the debrief with Revner and the suspension for insubordination, throughout the train ride to New Charleston and the taxi's winding passage to the hills above the city where the cemetery looked out across the river, and throughout her walk in the dark, weeping rain to the plot of land marked out by her father's tombstone -- throughout all of this, she nursed a single question in her mind: Why had she gotten into the truck?
Why -- when Thaniel was still lying there, spine and ribs smashed, unnaturally contorted as he was, no longer useful to her or to the Agency; but, still alive, whimpering, conscious and in paralytic suffering -- why, then, did she get into the truck, and as he began to scream in frightened despair, did she refuse to look back?